Join us on Twitter and IRC (#ludumdare on Afternet.org) for the Theme Announcement!

Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

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I ended up naming my game DESEEDER! Because you’re destroying seeds.
For this game I tried out diagonal pixels! Sounds weird, but here’s what it looks like:

You might be interested to see what it looks like when you DON’T rotate the game 45 degrees! Let’s find out:

The programming logic was a bit confusing, until I started imagining the entire game in the unrotated version (second gif). I ended up only having to convert the coordinates in the renderer, to make my collision still based on rectangles!

If you have any questions about how I did any part of the game, let me know! Here’s the link again: DESEEDER

I’m excited to check out everyone’s games! I’ll definitely prioritize yours if you let me know about it! There’s no shame in self-promotion right now <3

Recently I’ve made a post – http://ludumdare.com/compo/2014/12/06/puzzle – where I show off progress on the random puzzle generator I created for LD31. A few of you were interested in how I created it, so here I am to explain it!

First of all, here’s the newest gif of me playing the first couple randomly generated levels, and an image of one of the higher levels:

Create a random level generator that provides the player with a challenging, yet always solvable, sliding puzzle.

Here’s the trick!

I programmed a simple noise generator (loops through all tiles on the screen and sets them to a random tile). Then I made a pathfinding algorithm that starts at the spawn point and finds all possible moves. It’s kind of like A*, where if a move gets you to a spot quicker than a different move, it over-writes it. Then I simply determine which spot took the highest number of moves to get to, and place the end there! If the spot with the highest number of moves isn’t “hard” enough, I generate another level from scratch and try again, until the level meets a certain difficulty.

The water.

You die when you touch the water. That was pretty easy to put into the generator. Basically I tell it the same thing as I do to the snowman: if there is water along the path, you can’t go down that path (restart the player). The generator has no problem dealing with that.

The coins… oh the coins.

I really wanted to give the player something to collect as an added challenge, as they solve the puzzle. The goal here is not to place coins in the middle of the path to the end. That would be way too easy for the player. So basically I created another algorithm that tells me if Point A can lead to Point B (or pass through it, even). I found the best way to make coins was to check these:

– You can pass through the coin safely from the start.
– Wherever you land next, you can pass through the start, AND reach the end (if you can’t reach the end, it’s in an unsolvable position!)
– If you can get from wherever you land after you pass through the start BACK to the coin (basically, if it’s possible to get other coins).

I’m kind of worried that there are very specific “corner cases” where this generator doesn’t make every coin collectable. But I’ve never seen it happen, so maybe it is flawless!

How fast does it generate?

Fast for the small levels, and quite slow for the end levels (30 seconds some times). So what I did is make the generator create the rest of the levels while the player is solving the first ones! It can create all 20 of them by the time you reach level 5. Also, I did a lot of fooling around with the density of water and blocks, and found some densities are better for the generator to quickly create harder levels, quicker.

Alright! Well I hope you enjoyed the post! I also hope this inspires you to try out random generation – it’s not all that hard once you get the concept down. 😀

This was going to be my second time in a row missing Ludum Dare since I started, in LD24… because I received a ton homework to do this weekend (it’s my first semester at university :D).

But I ended up making something interesting anyway!

I basically made a random puzzle generator with the simple mechanic of dashing/sliding in each direction. The difficulty of each level is quantifiable. In fact, the blue square is positioned in the hardest spot to land in the entire level, each time 😉

Latest version, and older placeholder version:

I’ve gotten genuinely stuck on some of the harder levels it generated. Perfect! I love a good challenge! >:3

So anyway, maybe I’ll make it into something worth submitting by the end of Monday. I have a plan, but it’s a lot to do in the time I have available with school and all.

Before I write my post, please check out Texture Tiler. It’s a website I made to help you guys test how well your images tile! Just paste, drag, or upload the picture to see how it tiles. 😀TextureTiler.com

So, I’m hoping to go for the compo, but I have a family thing on Sunday so if I run out of time, I might do the Jam just for the couple minutes of extra time. Hopefully I can pull off something neat!

http://TextureTiler.com/
We all know that sometimes it can be a huge pain to get textures to seamlessly tile. My friend (GhostID) and I (Zanzlanz) wanted to make a tool to help game developers with their art. After a random epiphany, I thought it would be a great idea to make a simple site that can quickly test how well they tile.

To test how well your textures tile, you may do 3 things (works best in Firefox and Chrome):
– Paste the texture into the page
– Drag the file onto the page
– Simply load it

I hope this simple tool helps you guys too! 😀
There’s also a Twitter account dedicated to it, if you wish to follow it: @TextureTiler

Right now I am in a hotel, installing Flash onto my dad’s laptop. I will TRY to make a game in the little time I have (good thing the theme is what it is).

Anyway, if I have time, I’ll use Flash, GIMP 1.6, and Audacity. I have nothing but the source code of my old game FLIPTRIS. I might use this to speed up the progress. This means I will have to enter the jam, rather than the compo. Aw well.

I’ll be sure to have fun on my vacation. I hope I can come up with something decent in the little time I have.

If I weren’t on this trip, I’d definitely be super ready and eager to join, but right now I’m already tired and not too tuned in haha 😉